


Stillness of the Mind

by spaceleviathan



Series: Stillness of the Mind [1]
Category: Iron Man (Movies), Thor (Movies)
Genre: Cave Fic, Gen, Loki can survive anything, Loki doesn't explain anything, Tony-centric, Torture, loki the stomachless wonder
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-29
Updated: 2012-11-29
Packaged: 2017-11-19 19:35:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 20,943
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/576879
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spaceleviathan/pseuds/spaceleviathan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The fact Tony was trapped in a cave with a nameless doctor and an unforthcoming green-eyed mutant wasn’t the problem. The problem was that he had no way of getting them out.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Stillness of the Mind

**Author's Note:**

> I can't speak Russian. I used translators, so sorry if the translation is horrible. What I intended them to say is at the bottom.

Tony had dreams. He was screaming. He was unable to breathe, his chest ripped open, gaping, dripping. He was dying. In a dark place, his cries echoed back to him, pain-choked and gasping. He would blink and see people flicker in his vision. Men with masks, with scalpels, with dead eyes and foreign words yelling and panicking and angry and the glint of glass against the bright glare of a crude, blinding light. They put something inside his chest and he tried to bat them away, but he couldn’t move, he couldn’t stop them, he couldn’t do anything-

Tony didn’t have dreams afterwards. After, he slipped somewhere black and cool and free of memories, of ideas, of conscious thought. He rested.

—-

Tony Stark awoke in a prison with a car battery clipped to his insides.

He tore a tube out of his nose and felt it slide up through his stomach and up his throat before he was able to throw it across the dank room.

He tried to reach for the water just out of his grasp, but he didn’t dare reach out further for fear of ripping free his only chance at life.

He heard damp drip down, miserably echoing through the room, this cave, despite the fact he was in the middle of the desert in the dry season. A cruel little thing to make him that much more uncomfortable.

A man was standing next to him, and Tony wrongfully accused him of that same cruelty.

“What did you do to me?”

—-

That man fed him, saved him and smiled at him and explained very carefully all he knew about what was going on. An hour, perhaps two, passed with a fearful slowness that had Tony itching all over and jumping out of his skin at small noises.

The man saw his terror and sat him down and told him about the shrapnel in his heart. He gave Tony a distasteful souvenir and was patient, calm, collected. Despite everything, it helped.

Until they came for him. The slamming of the doors signalled their arrival, had Tony pulled up to stand from his perch, instructed to observe and copy, surrender peacefully, remain alive.

Five men entered, two dragging a body in between them. They threw the body to the ground where it remained, unmoving, and Tony wondered if it was dead. Then he saw the guns.

“Where did they get my guns?” He asked, still dazed perhaps, not believing this was real, and the man besides him hissed lowly, telling him to comply. Tony listened to the translation of his captor’s words with increasing horror, eying the potential corpse in the corner, knowing all at once how serious a situation he had found himself in. Yet, he still refused any demands they made of him. For a moment he felt like a hero.

But then the moment passed as he was immediately seized and tugged away. He strained to look back to his new companion, the doctor who saved him, who was now crouched over the limp body. The man was staring with solemn eyes at Tony, though his hands were clenched tightly around the other’s thin, slump shoulders.

Tony wondered a great many things as they pushed him down a corridor - if it were fit to call it such, when the terrorists were making use of a naturally occurring maze within this damned hunk of rock rather than carve anything more habitable - such as where he was going, what was going to happen, and whether he was going to come back bloody as that body had been.

He didn’t bother to wonder what he was here for, nor what they wanted from him. Money, potentially, and his weapons. He’d seen enough films to know what he was going to be up against.

Perhaps he knew, but knowledge wasn’t enough. He hadn’t realised how much it was going to hurt until they had forced the consciousness out of him in a haze of sweat, blood and pain.

—-

He awoke with his fellow inmate on the other side of the room. He groaned as he attempted to move, making the doctor laugh.

“Good morning, Mr. Stark.” He said, though there was no real indication of time here besides an individual and inaccurate mental ticking clock. Tony assumed the man must be guessing, if not simply lying. Tony didn’t return the greeting.

“How bad was it?” He asked, looking down at his chest. The man shrugged.

“Quite.” He said. “More than quite, really. But I’ve seen worse, and you’ve had worse.” His gaze was pointed, to Tony’s new handbag which looked strikingly like a car battery.

“I assumed you fixed me again, then.” He’d have to thank the doctor for it at one point, when he wasn’t feeling so battered and bruised, purple and blue. He’d have to.

He moved to sit by the man who was playing Backgammon against himself with rough dice and whatever he had found lying around in place of the checkers. Tony watched the game for a while. Perhaps, had he been more present, awake and alert, he would have joined in, but for now Tony was brooding. Plotting, if you will. He felt sluggish and no ideas were immediately apparent, but he was putting that down to the latest torture session and didn’t blame himself for a slowness of thought whilst he was stuck in here.

“I’ve seen that look.” The man said lightly, interrupting whatever string of semi-consciousness Tony was sinking into. “It never leads to good things.” He was focused on the game, eyes flickering occasionally to the fire where he had started cooking Tony a meal.

“Hmm?” He asked as the man abandoned his game to pour what looked nothing short of gruel into a bowl. The man didn’t answer until he had sat down again, after giving over the food and a spoon.

“In villages surrounding my home. Brave men and woman and children, searching for a way to overthrow their oppressors. They always failed.”

Tony picked at the food, staring into it searchingly, considering it as if in this crude dish the answers he sought would magically appear. They did not, and he was encouraged by the medical professional to eat instead.

“You will need your strength.” The man said.

They came for him again twenty minutes later.

—-

They took him into the sun perhaps two or three days later. Less or more, Tony wasn’t sure. He was going by the amount of times he had been driven unconscious by his torturers as if it were an accurate measure of day and night. His friend the doctor had patched him up, kept him fed, had yet to say sorry to him for his pain. Tony appreciated the lack of pity when his companion looked at him, because he needed to know he wasn’t weak for being unable to endure everything these men did to him. Sympathy would mean that he was.

He noticed, instead, that the doctor’s sad eyes were reserved for someone else. Someone more deserving, and perhaps more receptive, of them than Tony was. The body he’d assumed dead that first time he’d been taken away was a man alive and breathing, despite everything, despite horror stories. Tony’s fellow poor captured roommate had, repeatedly, made sure of that.

Tony wondered about this other prisoner every so often, the one he never saw. He wondered why that one was kept away where they’d slammed Tony and the doctor together in the same prison without any form of regard. There was room enough for one more within that cave – several, easily. Tony found it curious that their guards keep that one separate from the others and only brought him in for when medical treatment became paramount.

But then the thought was always chased away by more pressing matters before Tony could inquire further. His time was restricted in the hollow of his cell so the time his torturers took to try to persuade him was maximised. Tony, stubbornly, continued to refuse.

So, they changed tactics. They took him outside after he’d screamed himself hoarse, when his head was spinning and his cheeks stung from the salt in his tears and the scratches of wounds, and his legs could hardly support him.

They almost blinded him with the natural light he’d been denied these few days, and then blindsided him with the Stark Industries weapons collection they held merrily on display. Disgusted, furious, still shaking with pain, Tony barely kept his temper in check. His hands were trying to keep hold of the car battery, his tongue tried to stay calm, his brain tried to work. His thoughts were increasingly halting – getting worse with each passing day - and it was not a feeling he was used to without the liberal application of alcohol. A head wound gained over the past few days, perhaps, or severe shock, or his body just trying to recover, he had no idea. Having no idea was also a new one. He was becoming desperate. Desperate enough, perhaps, to agree.

Not to confuse agreement with idiocy, of course. He wasn’t stupid, and neither was his companion. They both knew they weren’t going to be allowed to leave just like that. There was going to be no escape.

—-

He was still brooding, something his mind still allowed him some ability to do at least, wrapped up carefully around the fire. Minutes had flown by, or maybe it was much longer. He wasn’t paying attention anymore. His friend had been tittering in and out of his vision during that short - or potentially lengthy - amount of time, worrying, or scolding, or not speaking at all. Either which way, he was not happy with Tony.

“That is your legacy, Stark.” He said. It wasn’t cruel, but it felt it. Cutting, like a scalpel; like a knife. Cold and unforgiving, like a bucket of water.

He was quite obviously attempting some sort of motivation speech, or at least trying to prod at all of Tony’s sore points until he snapped and did something excessive. Something that’d save them, or simply destroy their enemies. Anything. He wanted Tony to give him _something_.

“Is this the last act of defiance of the great Tony Stark?”

But Tony had nothing.

He was brilliant - he  _was_ the great Tony Stark.  _The da Vinci of our time._ With materials from his own inventions given freely en mass he could think his way out of here, surely.

But what was he supposed to do with guns against guns? He was stuck for inspiration. There were only the two of them, Tony weak with torture and a doctor worn thin from captivity, against countless armed terrorists who were a singular word away from pulling their many triggers repeatedly. Tony’s blood was nothing to them. Tony’s death would simply be another disappointment.

He couldn’t think here. The cave was too stifling - doubly so now he’d been outside again. His brain couldn’t process in the place where he’d been so scared, had too many terrors, been treated too maliciously. He just wanted to curl up and hide in the plentiful shadows until Rhodey came to rescue him. Rhodey would, Tony knew. Rhodey wouldn’t leave him here to die. Rhodey would find him. Rhodey loved him.

“Why should I do anything? They’re going to kill me, you, either way, and if they don’t I’ll probably be dead within a week.” He countered, wearily, lowly, hardly thinking. He couldn’t think. His ideas dragging, sleeping, dying. He stared at the fire. He didn’t pretend he cared.

His companion saw defeat in his eye and was understandably angry about it.

“Well, then,” He told Tony, chasing the gaze Tony refused to give him. Tony didn’t want to see the person he’d let down; this man he’d let die. “This is a very important week for you, isn’t it?”

They both jumped when the door banged. Voices yelled through in languages Tony still didn’t recognise, and they stood and put their hands on their heads meekly.

_Why now_? Tony thought.  _I’ve agreed, what more could they want_? More money, or something new? Tony didn’t want to find out. He tried to move away from the door, and his friend’s glance was seeped with his patient understanding as he did so. He moved to stand in front of Tony; an illusion of protection that shouldn’t have made Tony feel safer because this man was no shield. An illusion that helped Tony regardless.

The men who lumbered in were independent of their leader - the cheerful one with a wide smile and deadly eyes. There were three now: one pointing a gun threateningly towards their prisoners and two dragging that same bleeding body inside. The one with the gun was yelling in a language Tony’s cellmate returned, and, after dumping the mass heavily on an unforgiving floor, they left and locked the metal door with a lingering clang.

The doctor was by his patient’s side in a second.

“Help me.” He demanded of Tony, trying to hoist the body in a similar way to that of their captors. “I need him on the bed.”

They managed to lay the unconscious man length-ways on the cot and the doctor checked his pulse.

“Still breathing.” He informed Tony, though how was another matter entirely. Tony’s attention had not been focused on the man’s neck as his companion’s had, but on the yawning space where Tony was sure internal organs were supposed to go.

The doctor, calm and cool-headed and everything Tony wasn’t in that moment, ordered him away. He would do more harm than good if he lingered. Wanting to throw up, Tony returned to the fire, facing away from a man he was sure was soon to be dead.

He could hear his companion work tirelessly for a long time. Tony himself wasn’t sure what was happening, but the medical man was obviously doing absolutely everything he could like he had for Tony.

Tony’s attention turned to the car battery he held in his lap. He studied it like a puzzle, thinking about how he always used to deconstruct his cars just to improve them and put them back together again. He thought about how he used to tinker instead of worry, and how he used to be brilliant instead of constantly terrified. He tried to think, but nothing came.

His friend sat beside him eventually again. Tony met his eye and inquired about the other man’s wellbeing. He didn’t expect good news.

The doctor sighed. “He is in critical condition, of course. You saw what they have done.” He threw a dark look into the fire, as if allowing a few evil thoughts to fester but burning them up soon after, leaving no evidence they ever existed behind. It was imperative to their continuing survival. “But he’s met impossible odds before and beaten them. He’d have been dead many times over had he not been as strong as he is.”

“He has no stomach.” Tony demanded, horrified and sickened and completely besides himself. “How is he not dead?”

“I sewed him up. There is only so much I can do for a man like him.”

Tony’s eyes flickered to the body on the now bloody cot, and then back to the doctor. He questioned, curiosity filling his body with a rush, hands clenched around the car battery like a lifeline. Which, of course, it was. “A man like-?”

“He is a mystery to everyone here, myself included.” The doctor said quietly, leaning in to share a secret. “They say he fell from the sky, through time itself. They do not know his name, nor where he came from, but they want to. They tried what they did to you at first - torture the information out of him - but it didn’t work, not for weeks. Increasingly they have hurt him, tried to destroy him when they realised he either didn’t know the answers himself or would never tell them no matter how deeply they cut into him. Now they’re just seeing how much they can take from him before he dies. He used to return to me with bruises and a concussion, but recently they throw him at me and expect me to fix where they’ve removed a something important. Today, it was the stomach and a large part of his small intestine.”

Tony wanted him to stop, feeling queasy, but his companion continued, heedless or uncaring of Tony’s discomfort.

“I could do little but clean him up, keep him asleep and pray. I closed his skin, and now I must wait. I will not be surprised if he dies, but the fact he has not yet done so shows me something miraculous. Every single time he has returned to me, to us, to greet another day in this wretched place, and every time I wish he had not.”

“You said you’d pray for him.” Tony interjected, looking up from his unsteady hands, and there were the doctor’s sad eyes which Tony had never seen directed at him, nor for him.

“Of course I pray. I always do.” He said morosely. “I pray he does not wake up.”

Tony stood up sharply, swerving away from the doctor’s gaze and trying to find some escape. Not from this place, of course, because he’d written that off as a lost cause god only knows how many perhaps-days ago. He looked over the cave again, just in case, but there was nothing. The only way out was through that door which opened on the other side, which locked on the other side, which was made out of reinforced steel and looked as heavy as it was solid.

There was no way out. No ventilation shafts, no secret passages in the walls, nothing bar rock, rock, some more rock, and that ugly, practical and efficient fucking door. Tony hated looking at it, wanted to throw things at it and aggravate the guards unnecessarily, but he didn’t. He thought about the pain they’d put him through before, or what they’d put his friend through, or what they’d done to this man dying on the scrapheap they called a bed. Tony’s gaze was drawn there now, unconsciously, and he didn’t want it to be. He looked despite himself. He couldn’t help it, he looked.

The man was long, pale, thin. Starved, judging by his hollowed cheeks and gutting cheekbones, and the lack of organs wasn’t helping him any. He didn’t actually fit on the cot, he was longer than it was, so his bare feet dangled, slack and unfeeling to the chill permeating the now choking air.

His hair was black, long and bedraggled, unkempt and uncared for like the rest of him. He was clean only where the doctor had washed away blood; his face was filthy and grime-smeared. Tony would assume he himself would be similar had his torturers not taken it upon themselves to make sure his head met water every day repeatedly for far longer than Tony had ever wanted to experience it.

His clothes were simple, like Tony’s; obviously not his own, ill-fitting as they were. They were torn in too many places, completely absent across his stomach, and Tony reached out to pull a thin rag of a blanket over him as an act of comfort to ease the last moments of a dying man.

Tony wondered how long he’d been here, this creature who’d suffered so. Long enough that the terrorists realised they were not going to get anything out of him and long enough for them to start stepping up their game.

Tony asked the doctor, realising for the first time that the man must have also been here longer than Tony had, and Tony speculated what the doctor had been forced to endure during his personal stint in this god-forsaken place.

“I am not sure. He was here before I was.” The doctor replied. “I have heard only rumours of him. I dared not ask.”

“Haven’t you spoken to him?” Tony looked down to the dirtied face, the gaunt features, the sallow complexion.

His friend shook his head. “He rarely wakes. When he does, he is scared. When he does, they come for him.”

Tony could imagine it. They had done much the same to him these last few days, though they did usually allow him a time to be fed and patched up by the good doctor. Apparently, this one was not worth the same courtesy. Presumably, when they stopped wanting something from him, his value as a toy increased. He was no longer something to be preserved, or even kept alive. He was a game - to see how much they can torment him without killing him. It brought the bile back to Tony’s throat.

“What’s his name?”

The doctor didn’t know, but he said that neither did the terrorists who kept them locked in here.  The doctor told Tony there was nothing to be done to help him now. They couldn’t stop this man being taken away, and one day they would inevitably end up killing him. Until then, the two of them would just have to be there to sew him back up where he’d been ripped open and keep themselves alive to ensure they’d be there to do it. There was nothing else to be done about it.

But Tony was beginning to disagree. Disgust and pain and blinding, righteous fury was building up inside of him and he was staring again at the car battery, remembering how he used to tinker and recreate and improve with wild and innovative feats of engineering. He saw a pencil on the table, a mound of paper right next to it. He was unused to such out-of-date mediums of design, having not used a piece of paper for his blueprints since before MIT, but he snatched them up now and started to feel the creative juices flowing again, powered up and driven by the barrage of negative emotions he felt about this cave, that door, and the people keeping them here. This unconscious man in front of him, that brilliant doctor beside him, and the hands which now held a shivering pencil, were all going to die if not for Tony. They were going to lose their lives if Tony couldn’t find a way out.

But there was no escape to be found, Tony already knew that, which left Tony no other choice. Tony was going to build one.

—-

When the injured man finally started to stir, Tony did not immediately call out for the doctor.

He had been left almost completely alone for the last seventeen hours. Wonderfully, blissfully alone.

The doctor was the exception - he had been hovering around his unconscious patient with increasing worry - stating that usually the dark-haired man would have awoken about seven or eight hours after they left him here, no matter the extent of the injury – but besides that, he had let Tony work.

Tony had been feeling a lot better these last few hours, his mind suddenly back on track, now determined and resourceful and overflowing with plans and ideas. He’d been able to sketch a fair few of them down in the time he’d been given away from torture and soul-searching conversation. One particular scheme, drawn in parts over several pieces of paper, was coming together beautifully. That, likely, was going to be Tony’s Plan A. Or just his plan, as all the others were showing major flaws when considered in depth, and whilst this one was far from perfect if Tony got the right tools then he should be able to lead himself and the other two prisoners out in relative safety, along with causing maximum damage to their enemy. As a bonus, he’d be able to destroy all the Stark Industries weapons the terrorists had a hold of. Assuming he got the tools.

The materials were easy to get his hands on, but he had to trick his captors into giving him everything else he needed under the guise of building them the Jericho missile. He hoped he could build his plan fast enough for them not to get suspicious.

But then, he also wanted to do something about this damned battery keeping him alive. It was ingenious, yes, especially considering the environment the doctor had been working in, but hardly practical for a workplace, and not really particularly Starkian either. Luckily, Tony had one or two ideas about what he was going to do with that as well.

The bearded leader had returned briefly three hours after Tony had agreed to build them the missile, to see when he wanted the materials. Tony had waved the plans in his face and had the doctor translate that he wasn’t ready to build just yet. He stated that he didn’t have the blueprints memorised - a lie, of course, but they didn’t know that - and he was trying to design. They had left quickly when the doctor had implied that their presence was slowing Tony down.

Before he left, the leader had glanced at the still bleeding victim on the bed, and had asked the doctor a question which wasn’t translated for Tony’s sake. The doctor shook his head in reply.

It was around then, after the armed men had left, that the doctor started to glance worriedly between the cameras and the should-be-for-all-intents-and-purposes-dead patient, seemingly increasingly terrified. Tony knew from careful observation that the man would be dragged off almost immediately after he’d regained consciousness - if he did at all - and Tony didn’t think he could bear the thought of what they’d do to him this time if he pulled through what they had done in the last session. Without delay Tony stood and shifted, sitting with his back to the camera and his chair angled in a way which blocked off his newest companion’s unconscious face. Simple, but brilliant, with Tony blocking the way the camera would no longer know when exactly the man awoke, which served a double purpose of making Tony a knight in shining armour and giving him some time to talk to the stomachless wonder. He was curious about this man, and wanted to know some of those crucial details everyone else was lacking.

Why he thought he’d be able to get information where torture had failed was not a question Tony was fully capable of answering. ‘Because I’m Tony Stark,’ would have been his usual answer before this whole debacle had occurred. Tony figured some calming words and a few moments of safety might be a more potent method of encouragement than water boarding.

To Tony’s surprised joy, as soon as he’d moved the doctor had given him a  _look_ , and what a look it was. It encompassed relief, gratitude and pride along with a stern undertone which told Tony to keep an eye on him, and with it the doctor passed along the torch of responsibility. A heavy burden, but all Tony truly had to do was keep the doctor informed if the man woke up, or, more likely, if he stopped breathing. Without his burden, the older man was now capable of moving around the cave with more freedom, cooking and tidying and sleeping and generally attempting to make their incarceration even slightly more bearable - something which he hadn’t been able to do when keeping an eye on his still stubbornly living patient.

Tony himself was focusing on the sketches and calculations he had drawn up, critically trying to analyse them in fear of something he missed; something which would cause everything to go wrong. He wasn’t allowed mistakes here, where there were real, tangible, innocent people at stake. Every so often he’d glance up, remembering his job as the doctor’s eyes, but nothing changed for a long time.

Over ten hours in, the body convulsed. Tony, having been lost deep inside his plans, was jerked aware by it. Startled, he called out, “Hey! Hey!” and the doctor came running when he saw what Tony was gesturing wildly at. Tony scrambled back to allow the man room, and then turned away when he saw a dark, thick stain seep through the blanket.

Tony retreated to one of the further reaches of the cave, faced the wall and tried not to panic.

He’d been too slow, he thought to himself. He was too late. While his plan well on the way to becoming a reality the longer he stared at his specifications, one of the people he was working on it for was going to die anyway. If he’d been rational sooner - if he hadn’t been so selfish - if he had just sat down and  _thought_  -

Tony attempted composure. He tried not to listen to the sounds that floated over to him, echoed by the hollow walls. The sudden cry of a voice foreign to him, one that could only belong to the dark-haired man he’d failed to help, scared him to shaking. He could also hear, below that, the increasingly frantic pants of breath that the doctor took despite his best effort to keep calm.

Shouting came from outside the doors, banging which made the world seem like a blinding, ugly cacophony and Tony sunk his head down beneath his knees, hands over his ears, trying to keep air in his lungs. The doctor was calling back to the outside, perhaps telling them to go away or to inform them that their prisoner was dying, and whatever he said worked when the clash of metal stopped and the voices left. But those half-choked screams did not.

When sudden silence overcame the room, Tony knew that the man was dead.

He turned to see the doctor was collapsed in the seat Tony had abandoned. Tony approached and put a tentative hand on the back of the chair. The doctor looked up. Tony looked down, saddened but trying not to show it. A moment past, until the doctor’s face twisted, became a smile, then a grin, then even a laugh. Tony turned his head again.

“He’s alive?” He asked, amazed by the steady, if occasionally halting, rise and fall of the man’s chest. The doctor nodded, clearly as mystified as Tony.

“He is healthy, considering. I might even be capable of saying that he is stable. From here, it is unlikely his condition will worsen.”

“Jesus.” Tony stepped closer, almost reaching out to touch the miraculously still breathing body, but curled his fingers away when the doctor called out.

“I wouldn’t go near him yet. Stable is a relative term, especially here. A more accurate expression may be as stable as he can be whilst bleeding out in a cave.” Perhaps there was even some amount of morbid humour in that sentence, driven out of the elderly man by the relief he felt. He stood back up, allowing Tony to retake his previous protective position, and engaged the engineer in some light conversation about not really much at all which took Tony by surprise. It faded out quickly when he realised Tony needed to return to his work, but it was pleasant and left them both feeling a little lighter. Optimistic, even.

—-

Tony’s grasp on time was something which was and always had been abstract. Sometimes days went by without him noticing, when he was either drunk or just neck deep in some new project or another. Other times he couldn’t help repeatedly glancing back at the clock, wondering when the next minute would pass. In the cave, Tony experienced time in a way that was completely new.

Whilst not graced with a watch or a clock, he instead had a mental timer which had evolved rapidly during those terrifying times between awakening from pain-driven unconsciousness to the moment the terrorists would come and take him away again. He was able to keep track of the time, so long as he allowed that part of his brain constant attention. Now it took very little effort, but before, when his brain had slid to that grinding halt, it had almost crippled him to just count each second to the point where he could hardly eat or talk because he was trying to find a pattern in his captor’s timings, despite what little good such knowledge would do him.

Now it was something of a godsend. When the doctor would occasionally interrupt him, Tony would be able to tell him how long his patient had been out for, down to the minute usually, and sometimes even the second. If nothing else, there was at least a general idea of how much time had truly past in comparison to how much time seemed to have gone by in their captivity.

At seventeen hours and twenty-ish minutes, which felt like only a few to Tony and probably weeks to the doctor, Tony’s gaze flickered up when he caught twitching in his periphery.

“Welcome back, sleeping beauty.” He said when hazy eyes started to open with great difficulty. Eyebrows creased, and a head rolled heavily to face him. Tony smiled down at him, strong and defiant against their prison wardens, who now could not know that this man was awake thanks to Tony’s efforts. He didn’t even dare call the doctor over, because that would attract attention. Now he wouldn’t be taken away immediately and Tony could talk to him instead.

“Pain level, from one to ten?” He demanded. The man just looked at him blankly from the shadows of his sunken eye-sockets. Then something new occurred to Tony. “Sprechen sie Englisch?” He tried. “Hey, what nationality is he?”

The doctor did not know and called out, “Ask him.”

“I can’t speak languages. All I know rudimentary French.” The man was still cautiously staring at Tony, had curled up in on himself, and Tony didn’t like that at all. He tried French immediately. “Parlez-vous le français? Deutsch? ¿Español?” He ran out of languages pretty quickly after that.

The thing which seemed to get his attention was when the doctor called out, “Русский язык?” Tony had no idea what language that was, but it did garner a response. He called out an affirmative to the doctor.

“So he’s Russian.” The man said, still not having moved from his seat near the fire. He knew, as Tony did, not to call attention to their fellow prisoner. “Здравствуйте. Меня зовут Yinsen. Вы безопасны для теперь. Они не придут к вам.” He said, stiffly but apparently with a competent enough fluency for the other man to understand.

“Вы являетесь человеком, который спас мою жизнь.” The dark-haired man returned, now completely ignoring Tony in favour of straining his neck to see the doctor, who smiled at him softly, carefully. Like he had in the beginning when Tony had just woken up.

“Да.” He returned, which was as much Russian as Tony could understand.

“What did he say?” But the doctor shushed him in favour of grilling his newly awakened patient.

“Как вас зовут?”

Some hesitation preceded the word, “Локи.” Enough that it had Tony’s curiosity piqued even higher.

“Sorry?” Tony butt in loudly, turning the attention back to himself. “What was that?”

“His name is Loki.” The doctor translated, making Tony grin broadly at this new piece of information.

“Okay. Now ask Loki how the hell he’s alive.”

The doctor glared at him and did nothing of the sort.

“Вы откуда?”

The man, Loki, huffed in amusement in regards to the doctor’s newest enquiry, but didn’t answer. Instead he looked up to the ceiling, then around him, jostling his body around with little care for his wounds. He saw the cave as if looking at it for the first time, and perhaps he was. His gaze wasn’t completely clear, Tony saw, and he guessed that a head injury was not unlikely given the extent of Loki’s grievances.

“Is he okay?” He called out, and the doctor snorted.

“You will have to tell me, Stark. Look him over.”

“Will he be alright with that?” Tony said, eying the man on the cot with some amount of wariness. “He’s been ignoring me since he woke up.” Tony didn’t like being dismissed, especially when he was the one who’d been watching over this man for the last seventeen hours without sleep. He was also planning their escape which he would have assumed earned him at least a little acknowledgement, never mind that Loki didn’t know that yet.

“Этот человек является Тони Старк.” The doctor then said, and Tony heard his name in there so he supposed he was being introduced. He managed a smile at Loki when those dark eyes started to take him in properly and not with heavy caution like when he’d first woken. “Он может помочь вам, если вы позволите ему. Нам нужно проверить, что вы хорошо.”

Loki’s reply was amused, as if whatever pain he must surely feel didn’t even register at all. It was certainly absent in his tone. “Я могу заверить вас, я хорошо, доктор Yinsen.”

“Пожалуйста.” The doctor insisted, his tone firm, and Loki shrugged.

“Если это радует вас обоих.” He moved aside the blanket gently, but not without a grimace at the sight of his own blood that had spread across an alarming majority of it, to show Tony his stomach. Tony guessed that was permission.

“What am I looking for?” He asked the doctor.

“What does the wound look like?”

Tony was flummoxed. “A wound. It looks like someone has torn open someone else and taken important things out.”

“Я прошу вашего прощения?” Loki looked to the doctor, his hands going to his stomach, his fingers tracing over the stitches the doctor replaced not seven hours earlier. “Ах ради Одина.” He muttered, apparently to himself. He clenched his hands over his tummy and called out, “Я исцеления. Тот факт, что я проснулся следует освещать это.”

The doctor seemed inclined to agree. “It is alright, Stark. I will check him myself later.”

“You’re not in pain?” Tony couldn’t help but ask, transfixed on those long, pale fingers which were occupied with the stitching keeping his skin together. Loki sent him a look which Tony could almost translate despite the language barrier. It was something to do with his IQ. He’d seen it before enough times that he’d stopped even arguing with it. It wasn’t like his ego couldn’t take it, and Loki was quite likely concussed. Tony would forgive him this once, at least until he was feeling better.

“Вы в любой большой боли?” The doctor asked, and Tony guessed it probably was a repeat of his own question in a language Loki could understand. Loki was all smiles, apparently, because his amusement hadn’t dwindled during the entirety of the conversation. Perhaps the Russians found having their intestines taken from them a walk in the park, something trivial, and thought it sweet that the silly weak foreigners would worry about such a thing. Or perhaps they were just really pleasant people, even in the face of such horror. Especially in the face of such horror.

“Да,” He replied. “Конечно.”

Tony turned to the doctor, who nodded sadly. “He says, ‘Of course’.”

Loki was going again, Tony saw - his eyes were drifting away, and his attention waning. He seemed to be staring into the far distance rather than at either the doctor or Tony, and his hands had gone slack.

“He might have a concussion. Can we let him sleep?”

“It will do no harm, Stark.” The doctor replied, with a dark humour that was seemingly contagious between him and his patient. “It has yet to kill him, after all. Вы можете спать, Локи.”

Loki snorted, seemingly despite himself. “Я хотел бы видеть вас попробовать и остановить меня, доктор.” And he was gone, leaving Tony and the doctor looking at each other.

“Happy bloke.” The inventor stated, causing the doctor to smile darkly.

“I suppose gallows humour is not inappropriate given the setting.”

“I like him.” Tony concluding, glancing over Loki’s long, emaciated form again, nodding. “Seemed rational enough. How likely is it that he’ll be able to be up and about soon?” Because Tony was plotting again, something a lot simpler than the escape plan: a way of keeping Loki here, and not in the arms of men who ripped out organs for fun.

“Quite likely, but I’m still unsure of how he’s alive or how long he’ll remain so.” The doctor said, his voice duller at once, thick and tentative.

“You’re the doctor.” He said, and the man returned it with a sigh.

“But he-” He started, haltingly, a few hand gestures replacing words and filling gaps in his speech. “He is different, Stark. I am a doctor and I know a body. His physiology, it is unlike anything-” The doctor couldn’t finish, and just looked despairingly at the passed out Russian. “I do not know what he is.”

A mutant? Tony looked at the man in a new light. He’d heard about the mutants of course, though mostly low whispers and seemingly outrageous rumours, but it had Pepper constantly on edge. There was some issue with a few of the scientists in the R&D department because some others had accused them of being ‘abnormal’. Tony hadn’t been worried about it, he only hired the best and brightest after all, and the IQs on some of those people definitely passed as uncanny, but Pepper had her ears closer to the ground and always knew which way the winds were turning. Apparently, being considered a mutant was about as pleasant as it sounded.

He’d never met someone who could be accused of being a genuine mutant before. He’d heard tales of ones that looked exactly the same as everyone else but who had astonishing powers hidden inside, and someone who was capable of healing from the types of injuries this Loki person had endured sounded like the ideal candidate for Tony’s first real mutant encounter.

“Maybe he’ll help us.” He said suddenly.

“What? Stark, he shouldn’t move at all, not yet, in case his condition worsens.”

“With a mutation like that? Unlikely. If he’s fine now he’ll be even better later.”

The doctor eyeballed him because the body didn’t work like that, but judging from the ever easing breathing of the smiling Russian maniac, Loki was going to be just fine.

“Think of what it means. I say to them that I need assistance to build the Jericho, and that I can get it ready quicker with three men instead of two.” The doctor clearly understood. Loki could then stay with them instead of going straight back into the hands of the men trying to slowly murder him. “Technically it’ll be true.” Tony continued. “I’ll be able to finish the plan quicker the more hands I have at the ready.”

The doctor nodded, considering, glancing down at Loki then back to Tony’s now eager face.

“We can do this.” Tony insisted, observing the precise moment when the doctor realised he was right.

“I’ll need to make sure he’s stable first.” Tony could just about kiss him, delighted as he was. He hadn’t failed this man nor the doctor ultimately, he realised, and he wasn’t going to fail either of them again. They were going to get out of here, now sooner than ever. They were going to make it, even if it killed him.

—-

When Loki awoke again, it was to chaos. Tony almost missed when the man’s eyes flickered open, just to close again when he realised how many of his captors were milling around in what should have been a safe space. To Loki’s credit, he faked unconsciousness flawlessly. For a moment even Tony thought his eyes had deceived him.

People bustled about loudly, thankfully more preoccupied with their orders and Tony’s aggravated shouts than to pay any attention to the seemingly sleeping, perhaps even dead, man in the corner of the room.

Tony pointed fingers, gesturing wildly, whether a distraction tactic or just to piss off as many of the terrorists while he could, and besides him was the good doctor who dutifully translated with the same urgency that Tony’s tone held without the renewed sense of superiority over these cretins. Really, with the way these people handled his weapons it was a miracle - or perhaps a curse - that they hadn’t blown up the entire mountain already.

Tony was in his element here and he was rattling off a list of the tools he needed without even having to think about it. They were all necessary of course, but he’d like to see the man who was given the job of getting a smouldering iron in the middle of a desert within a matter of hours. Tony had a feeling the bosses who ran this joint weren’t in the habit of being patient.

He glanced back to Loki when the doctor had taken over for him and saw the tenseness about the man as he continued to lie there and play dead. Tony felt his lips thin, but didn’t say anything. The sooner the bastards were out of here the better, but he wasn’t going to risk them dropping something crucial to his plan if he tried to hurry them along. Loki would just have to wait a little longer.

“Oh,” He said, clicking his fingers in front of the man who had taken charge in the absence of the grinning leader he’d met before. “That man,” he gestured, waiting for the doctor to translate. “Is needed in our building. I need two extra men to build the missile.” A lie, obviously, Tony could build it by himself blindfolded with a cardboard box and some paper clips, but what they didn’t know wouldn’t hurt them. At least, not until Tony had finished with his plan in which case what they didn’t know was going to hurt like a motherfucker.

The man began to argue with the doctor, but the older man was having none of it. Tony was surprised by the stern and commanding tone his companion suddenly assumed; it was something which sounded solid enough to get even his own jailer to back down. The doctor turned to him when they all began to sift out, nodding in triumph.  

Free, finally, to fully engage his patient now that they had at least some amount of protection for him, he went to check on the Russian who still feigned sleep. It was immediately obvious that the doctor knew Loki was conscious, had probably known as soon as he’d awoken, and so he was harsh in his treatment as he pulled the emaciated man up by a single shoulder.

He spoke lowly in Russian, which Loki returned, and was allowed to check the man’s grossly hollow stomach. The doctor had promised to explain what was happening; was no doubt delighted by the chance to finally give the man some good news. The Russian was thankful and nothing short of relieved, as was clear in his voice. Tony, breaking apart some of his smaller weapons for the parts inside, managed a smile of his own when he heard it.

—-

Tony had been thankful to jump back into his engineering, the familiarity of it a crutch he sorely needed, and he was even more glad that the doctor seemed more than capable of assisting him. On a more sombre note, Loki had taken one look at the machines, and then another, before blinking again and out-right staring. It was almost as if he’d never seen technology before. The man had muttered something under his breath in what didn’t sound much like Russian - though what did Tony know? - before addressing the doctor with a note of panic in his eyes.

Soothing and forever kind, the doctor pushed him besides the fire with a blanket for his shoulders and a few cursory checks to his general wellbeing before taking their conversation over to Tony.

“You’ll have to forgive him, but I think he’s damaged his head more than I initially thought. He cannot recognise a single thing.” Loki had seemed rational enough, the doctor explained, but thinking about it, there  _was_  something odd to his pattern of speech which the doctor had initially put down to a concussion and his own faltering attempts at Russian. Between the two of them, however, they’d both realised they shared a large pallet of languages and the doctor soon noticed it was indeed Loki’s speech pattern which was unusual and not the doctor’s imagination. Moreover, Loki could not fully remember how he came to be here in the first place. All Loki knew, Tony was told, was that he had landed hard in the middle of somewhere far too hot and far too empty.

“How many languages do you speak?” Tony asked, because it didn’t matter if Loki was of any real use or not, so long as it  _appeared_  that he was to the cameras.

“A lot,” The doctor answers with a dismissive shrug of his shoulders. “But apparently not enough for this place.” In the midst of the doctor listing off a list of languages extensive enough that Tony barely recognised a few of their names, never mind placing where they could originate from, he continued to tinker, pulling out the innards of one of his missiles while the doctor glanced over to check on his patient. “Impressively,  _he_  speaks all of them and more. His skills for languages are greater than anyone I have ever met.”

“But he can’t speak English?” Tony said, but he wasn’t largely invested in that line of conversation, more interested in who exactly he was now working to wipe off the face of the planet.

“They call themselves the Ten Rings.” The man said, after a barb which would have cut Tony deeper if he hadn’t accepted by this point that he’d fucked up big time. He knew that, thanks doc, time to move on to better things than making Tony feel steadily shittier.

“What kind of a name is that?”

“I do not know it’s significance. All I know was that it started in Eastern Asia and has started to spread, terrorising entire countries into bowing down to them.”

Tony pushed the inner mechanics away from him harder than intended, a shallow clang reverberating around hollow walls. Loki looked up, glancing at the machinery, then came to stand beside his new cellmates, abandoning his blanket along the way.

Tony noticed the man leaned heavily on the tabletop when he reached them but besides that he had seemed steady on his feet; graceful even. Heck of a mutation. What Tony wouldn’t give to have whatever Loki had instead of a car batter clipped to his chest cavity.

“What have they asked you to build?” He asked, accent as far from Russian as an accent could possibly get. Even the doctor started when he heard it, the man sounding more like a British aristocrat than a Russian prisoner.

“So, you  _do_  speak English?” Tony managed, looking up properly from the dissection of his own weapons to stare openly at the multilingual confounding mutant before him. Said mutant was giving him a pair of raised eyebrows instead of a reply, because so much was obvious.

“I apologise, I did not think-” The doctor tried, but Loki’s look was a little kinder to the man who had repeatedly saved his life. At least Tony knew what he’d have to do to get into Loki’s good books: stop with the obvious statements and get them the hell out of this cave. He was on it, he promised, there was just something a little more immediate he had to finish first.

“What are you building?” Loki asked again when Tony returned to dismantling his next missile along. Tony didn’t answer him any more than he’d answered the doctor. It was plausible deniability, for now anyway. The later stages needed at least one of the two to help him, but if he were caught in the early stages the least he could do was keep his fellow prisoners ignorant. There was torture for information, and then there was torture for tortures sake. Loki knew it too well by this point. There had to be a limit to his mutation, like there was definitely a limit to the doctor’s mortality. Tony wasn’t willing to risk either at this point when there were still too many variables out of his immediate control.

“We might be more productive if we were included in the planning process.” The doctor pointed out, garnering a flippant response from Tony which had both Loki and the doctor looking down at him with amusement far from their features. Tony didn’t care at this point; this part wasn’t the escape plan, anyway, and he’d just found exactly what he needed.

—-

Hunched around the centre table, Loki’s shoulders were once more burdened with the meagre warmth of his blanket. Doctor’s orders. The doctor had used that  _tone_  again. In his defence, Loki had offered up some semblance of protest, but eventually he was forced to just allowed the drapery to remain on his back after the third time the doctor had picked it up from where the maybe-Russian had cast it heedlessly to the floor. The doctor showed no sign of irritation or any indication he’d ever stop should Loki continue in his childishness, but the emotional effort it took to try to stop the man each time he stood from his place and crossed to the other side of the table was clearly draining Loki faster than his still rocky health allowed for.

They were both watching Tony pick apart what to them must have been a fairly terrifying piece of technology. To Tony it was something brilliant - of course it was brilliant, it was Stark Tech after all - but relatively simple. Weapons always had been simple, to Tony at least. He’d grown up around weaponry being built and he’d never really stopped to learn how it was made; it was just the simple mix of physics, chemistry and engineering. The only time he really ever got a decent conversation out of his father was when Tony had asked about the newest Stark weapons range, which didn’t perhaps speak of the happiest childhood but Tony wasn’t complaining. Not when the knowledge he had amassed from those revered discussions was about to get him out of a very serious pickle or two.

Their eyes on Tony didn’t unnerve the inventor, he was much too hardened for that. He’d been exposed to people staring at him working since he proved himself a child prodigy, and though in recent years his own private workspace monitored by his own AI slash butler was a pleasant change, it didn’t erase all the time he’d spent being gawked at. It’d take more than a potentially Russian hyperpolyglot and a highly intelligent doctor - or scientist or linguist or whatever his friend was - to creep Tony out.

Loki, since he’d decided to reveal in the most dramatic way he could have conceived that he was more than perfectly adept at English and had been capable of understanding Tony since day one, managed to put Tony in mind of JARVIS. Yes, it was almost solely the accent, though the dead pan snark and black wit that was ever present in the man was also a major factor. Loki delivered jokes in the exact same way as Tony’s very much missed AI. The inventor had never before realised there were others in the world who appreciated that same shared humour which his AI had developed to complement Tony’s own.

“Okay,” He said, tossing away the majority of the mechanism. “We don’t need this.”

Two sets of eyes watched the intricate piece of machinery fly over his shoulder and crash loudly on the stone floor. It was probably shattered, perhaps irreparably, but Tony had no need of it and didn’t exactly want their captors finding any use of it. If worst came to the worst they could use it as a blunt object, though now that they had given Tony all the tools he could possibly need the three of them had a better range of heavy weapons should they require them. Loki didn’t look like he’d pack a punch, nor did the good doctor, but armed with a hammer and the motivation to escape they could still cave in a skull or two.

Loki’s eyes lingered on the floor behind Tony, but the doctor’s attention was drawn to what Tony had extracted from the missile part. “What is that?” He asked, and Tony showed him.

“Palladium. Point one five grams. We need at least one point six, so why don’t you go break down the other eleven.” He gestures to the left over missiles, and the doctor complied, leaving the table to copy the way Tony had broken off the missile head to reach into the interior and remove the inner workings.

Tony then sent Loki a look. The Russian returned a blank one, before realisation came across his face and he shook his head.

“You jest. I do not know these machines, though I have been kindly informed, repeatedly, by men I would sooner tear limb from limb than converse with willingly, that they are highly explosive and can cause a disastrous result if handled incorrectly.”

Tony shrugged. “As if they know how to handle weapons. If they haven’t exploded by now they probably never will. You saw what I did, didn’t you?”

Tentatively, Loki nodded. Tony stood, Loki following with some trepidation, and repeated the action again. A few missiles over, the doctor seemed to be letting out as many of his pent-up frustrations as he could in his disassembling of the armaments. Tony let him be. The man needed an outlet, and destroying weapons was practical, therapeutic and symbolic.

“See?” He gestured to the doctor when Tony saw Loki watching him. “They’re not made of glass.”

“I can see that.” He returned literally, perhaps not recognising the expression. Foreign tongues and all that. Tony, not bothering to clarify, removed the head and took out the innards before motioning to the next missile over.

“You want to get out of here, right?” He asked, looking Loki in the eye, deadly serious.

“I thought you were building something for that. This is just heedless destruction.” Loki protested, but he left Tony’s side with a sudden urgency.

Immediately after, when he came to stand besides the missile, Tony saw the flaw in his plan.

Loki was not a small man, he was far too tall to be perfectly honest, and he towered far, far over both Tony and the doctor. But neither was Loki a healthy man. He was all skin and bone, and the only workout he’d been allowed in this cave had been the struggles he’d made against his torturers. He was wasting away, with each hour showing him thinner, gaunter, paler, and Tony wondered why he’d ever thought Loki would be able to do manual labour in the way the doctor and himself could.

“Never mind,” he started to say, moving to push Loki aside as the man reached for the missile head, but the next moment said head was detached from the body and was held in one of Loki’s skinny hands. Tony stared openly.

“Oh.” He said, and Loki’s expression was condescending enough to tell Tony that he was well aware the inventor thought him weaker than he truly was. Tony wasn’t the only one who had assumed something similar, after all. Loki, likely, relied on such a delusion in this wretched place. He scoffed after tossing Tony the machinery and moved along.

On Tony’s table a small pile was growing, the doctor - and now Loki - made a game out of trying to pile the complicated shapes on top of each other. Tony took his pleasure in taking one out of the bottom to topple their increasingly elaborate  tower from the ground up.

Once they had finished collecting the parts, Tony was still extracting the palladium, so they began to create a model out of the discarded pieces. Loki seemed to relax minutely as he and the doctor did so, and when Tony had finished they used the last of the mechanisms to make a head for what appeared to be an abstract horse. Or perhaps it was a wolf, Tony couldn’t tell. He wasn’t exactly one for art.

“Well, that’s one way to pass the time.” He said. He was impressed, genuinely, by their ingenuity, even if it wasn’t helpful to his overall scheme.

“You’re finished, Stark?” Loki asked. “What do we do now?”

“You should rest.” The doctor said. “You will get no better by staying on your feet.”

“I’m not on my feet.” The Russian answered, and yeah, he really needed some idiom training. Or perhaps he was just being deliberately obtuse. He seemed the type.

It took the two of them to convince Loki to budge from his place on the floor, and even then he only shifted when they moved to hoist him up by the arms and forcibly drag him back to bed.

“I’ve had enough of being man-handled, thank you.” He spoke scathingly, pushing himself up and leading himself away. “Please concoct your genius plan without me. It’s not as if I’d like to escape as well.”

He had sarcasm down pat, at least.

The doctor turned to Tony then, questioning him with his eyes.

“See to your patient.” Tony said. “I got this.”

\---

“Careful. Careful, we only get one shot at this.” They didn’t have any more missiles after all, and Tony was running out of time. The doctor, however, remained calm, smiling, focused on the molten palladium.

Tony watched as the man follow the instructions Tony had given him to the letter, trusting the doctor more than he trusted himself at the moment - seeing, as they both knew, that the doctor was significantly steadier than Tony was. Tony, whilst growing calmer with every second bringing him closer to a (hopefully) working heart and a way of escape, his hands still held a trace of that initial tremor which had haunted him for the first few months of his capture.

He wasn’t sure what made him consider it then, perhaps it had something to do with the way Loki was watching them moodily from the cot across the room, or the fact that the doctor was potentially one of the most convenient people to share a cell with, that Tony realised he had no name to put to the face. At least with Loki he had something - though no surname and no real knowledge of who he was or where he came from - but with the doctor, he was just that: the doctor, who had continually saved both Tony and Loki’s lives and was still keeping them alive and as healthy as one can be with a hole in one’s chest, or a missing stomach.

“What do I call you?” He asked, as the palladium began to fill the perfectly circular mould. From the cot, Loki snorted.

The past few days had shown Loki to be a snide though generally optimistic individual, who had too many ghosts and too much of an ego. He had a habit of flexing his fingers, staring at them with frustration, as well as constantly refusing the blanket the doctor insisted he keep about him. He was too thin, the man said, and he had to keep warm. Loki insisted he was more than warm enough already, stuck in a blasted desert in the middle of summer, and that if he was told to wear that blanket when there was a perfectly good fire one more time he would tear it into ribbons and strangle them both. For a moment, looking at his set mouth and hard eyes, Tony believed he really would.

“My name is Yinsen.” The doctor said, and Tony felt a smattering of guilt for not inquiring previously. Why would he? Yinsen was the only person he’d had to rely on for the last few months and he’d never needed a name for someone he hardly left the side of. Yinsen was just there. He always was, waiting to help Tony that bit more.

“Yinsen. Nice to meet you.”

Yinsen, sounding more than amused - it had been almost three months and they were perfectly acquainted -  returned the greeting. “Nice to meet you too. Tea?”

Tony muttered an acquiescence, attention already focusing on something else, and Loki did too. Yinsen, obviously conflicted, inquired after his stomach.

“Stark mentioned a mutation, that you are a mutant.” Loki seemed confused, but then shrugged slowly.

“I suppose.” He agreed, garnering a semi-interesting glance from the inventor in question, but he was too deep within his last-minute alterations to the backing of the miniature arc-reactor to reply.

“Does that mean your stomach will grow back?”

“I don’t know, doctor, shall we slice open my abdomen and see?”

“Please, no blood in my workspace.” Tony interrupted loudly, because it was in this cave that he’d found he was more squeamish than he’d ever imagined himself to be, and torture was fast becoming one of his absolute no-go areas. “No cutting or slicing where I can see.”

“It’s alright, Stark, we’ll spare you your delicate sensibilities.” Loki rolled his eyes, standing up and once again dismissing the blanket from around his shoulders. “You were making tea, doctor? Consuming something is the most prudent way to discover whether or not I have re-grown organs.”

“Mutant.” Tony nodded, only to himself, taking a moment to imagine all the tests he could run when he got back home and had access to his own labs and top-of-the-range scanners. Anything to discover a way of growing back organs naturally, even when they’d been fully removed. The advances in medicine it’d make. It’d perhaps even win him the Nobel Prize. Again.

“What is a mutant?” Loki wondered. “I understand it is a synonym for abnormal, for something changed or altered, but you are using it in a different context.”

“It’s an advanced branch of humanity. Apparently, they’re the next stage of evolution.” Tony explained vaguely. “They’re recognised by varying amounts of weird and wonderful altercations their DNA has made on their body. Superpowers, almost. Yours, I guess, is to be able to survive some pretty outrageous things.”

Loki was looking at his hand again, turning it back and forth like he’d never seen it before, like he was willing it to do something hands were not usually in the habit of doing. “Perhaps.” He looked up, to the doctor and then to the inventor. “You are mutants yourself? I have seen many people come and go, but none have survived except for you.”

Yinsen shook his head, resting a cup on the table Loki was leaning on and then moving to pass Tony his tea before collecting his own. “Perhaps it could be said that Mr. Stark is a mutant, his mind is certainly something to call superhuman, but neither of us would be defined as such. We are merely mortals.” He said it with such cheer, such friendliness, that for a moment they could all forgot they were trapped in a cave by terrorists who were waiting to kill them. For a moment, they might be in a warm home, just friends meeting up and talking delightedly because their lives were not running down on a ticking clock.

Tony divorced himself from his work temporarily to watch Loki stare at his tea, Yinsen, holding his own cup to his chest, watching likewise. Loki glanced up and saw where their attention had been diverted to. And then the bastard smirked, tipped his tea to them, and downed it.

There was a pause, before Loki made a grand sweeping gesture with his hands.

“Well, that answers one question.” He stated proudly. Yinsen was immediately at his side, doctor mode activated, lifting up his shirt and prodding at the still alarmingly concave stomach.

He was muttering under breath in what Tony assumed was his native tongue, his intonation breathless with disbelief. Loki, as usual, found great amusement in whatever he was saying.

Tony went back to his work. “Mutant,” he marvelled again.

—-

It wasn’t more than an hour before Tony was ready to return to the palladium loop he had crafted for the contraption built to replace the car battery in his chest. It wasn’t perfect - how was it going to be when it had been crafted in these sorts of conditions? - but it was, hopefully, going to be more than adequate for the job.

Tony spent the next day fiddling with the rest of the miniaturised arc reactor, telling Yinsen very soon after starting that his hovering wasn’t conductive to Tony’s productivity; the same thing Yinsen had told the guards to stop them from disturbing them but days ago. It was true, this time.

By what Tony was assuming was nightfall - soon to be bedtime for the three prisoners anyway; they had designed their own day-and-night system in which the day ended right around now - he had transferred power from the car battery as well as a majority of the cave’s lighting into the new electromagnet. The tiny arc reactor was compact, wireless, and glowed brightly in the flickering lighting of the cave. As Tony powered it up Loki and Yinsen both looked over to see where the low whirring and the new brightness was emitting from, as well as what was causing the erratic sparking of the mounted lights.

Yinsen gave a low breath of amazement as he came to sit beside Tony. Loki aborted a movement to touch the reactor as he bracketed the inventor’s right-hand side.

“That doesn’t look like a Jericho missile.” Yinsen pointed out, and Tony corrected him.

“It’s a miniaturised arc reactor.” He informed them. “I got a big one powering my factory at home. It should keep the shrapnel out of my heart.”

Loki was transfixed, it seemed, flitting around the reactor like he’d never seen something so beautiful. Perhaps he hadn’t. Tony certainly couldn’t say he’d had the honour either. However, Tony was biased: not only had he made the contraption, but it was also designed to save his life.

Yinsen, meanwhile, had more sensible thoughts. “What could it generate?”

“If my math is right, and it always is, three gigajoules per second.”

The Russian sent a curious green eyed stare Tony’s way, but didn’t voice the comment the scientist could see lingering on his lips. It potentially had something to do with the definition of unfamiliar words, but at the same time it seemed more curious than confused - as if Loki was more than aware of what such massive amount of power could mean. Yinsen did too.

“That could run your heart for fifty lifetimes.” The doctor muttered, though it was clear he also knew about the other thing it could do. Yinsen’s doctor senses were probably afire with worry.

“Or burn it out in fifteen minutes.” Loki inserted, and though Tony personally would have said ‘sun-baked’, the sentiment was the same. “This could destroy you, Stark.”

“How do you know that? You hadn’t even seen any tech until this morning.”

Loki’s returning expression was partially offended, though mostly he just seemed smug. “I learn fast.” He answered, and wasn’t that the understatement of the year.

“I don’t trust that sentence.” Tony replied, staring suspiciously at a man who was proving to be another dark-haired genius to add to the cave’s increasingly numerous collection.

“I don’t trust this.” Loki replied sharply, gesturing to the arc reactor as the arrogance dropping from his face to reveal frustration and even some amount of helplessness. “I understand that you are desperate to fix that hole in your chest, Stark, but I also understand that the longer you waste on endeavours which help only you, the sooner they are going to discover that we are trying to escape.” He looked to Yinsen, irate and despondent, and then back to Tony, eyes blazing with something a lot more potent than anger. It looked something like defeat. His words were venom, spat out by someone who was for a moment beyond vehemence and nearing desperation. “Are you going to tell us this wondrous plan of yours, or are we simply going to be left to rot in the shadow of Tony Stark’s greatness?”

There was something deeper there, something which linked back to more than simply Tony’s inability to be a good person and help those around him no matter how hard he tried to keep them away from danger, but neither the inventor nor Yinsen called the man out on it. They wouldn’t have dared, even if they wanted to. Loki’s eyes was gleaming with an unholy green luminance. He almost startled the two of them, leaning over Tony especially, and maybe if the plan didn’t work Tony could just get Loki to loom like that over their enemies, because holy christ on a cracker if it didn’t seem like Loki had almost doubled in size. He looked like he was more than capable of cold-blooded murder as he stood there seething. For a moment, it looked like he could kill everyone without even trying.

Tony handed him some paper then, breaking the illusion and leaving Loki looking as he usually did - towering high above them both, but not so much so that he seemed almost other-worldly. Then he was just a skinny, incredibly clever mutant, looking much too lost and far too childlike to be the Loki they knew.

The man’s eyes flickered left and right, like checking they were still stuck in the cave, then down to the papers Tony offered. Reaching out a hand, he stared at his fingers, before snatching the designs away and flipping through them.

“Oh.” He said, mind piecing it together individually before turning back to the front to take it in as a whole. “How unusual,” was all he had to say, before returning them so Tony could show Yinsen.

Yinsen’s response was better for Tony’s ego, though he could see a certain degree of admiration in Loki’s eyes. It was in the way he hadn’t told Tony he was an idiot with an outrageous plan that’d never work and would get them all killed. Tony was thankful to both of them for not saying that. It was something that Pepper usually came out with, including the ‘it’ll get us killed’ part, and tended to be the thing which preceded Obie then walking in with pizza and talking to Tony long and hard about his priorities. Tony usually had a back-up plan which appeased both of his friends, but he didn’t have one here. The back-up plan this  time was to find something heavy and pray to any personal gods that the bastards didn’t see them coming.

—-

That evening found a moment of peace between the three of them, with Tony’s new fitting a success which was yet to fry his heart, and Yinsen proving an even better cook when he felt like he had found some hope for their continued existences.

They had opened a game of Backgammon - another thing which Loki found both a mystery and intriguing - and were playing with the nuts they’d unscrewed from the missiles.

“You still haven’t told me where you’re from.” Tony stated, glancing at Yinsen then at Loki. “Both of you.”

“I’m from a small town called Gulmira.” Yinsen was the first to reply, eyes on the game as he rolled the dice and made his move. “It’s actually a nice place.” Loki didn’t look like he was about to say anything to the question, staring ahead at the doctor’s clever tactic.

“Got a family?” Tony asked instead of pressing the polyglot. His eyes were not on the doctor, but nor were Yinsen’s on him.

“Yes,” Yinsen said, his voice bright. “And I will see them when I leave here.”

“You?” Tony glanced to Loki who kept his gaze focused on the game.

“No.” He said. “No one.”

Yinsen’s expectant look turn to Tony then. “And you, Stark?”

Tony, rolling the dice, echoed Loki’s  reply.

“No.” Yinsen said, not a question but a statement. He knew already. His eyes bouncing from the inventor to the mutant. “So you are a man who has everything, and nothing.”

Tony wasn’t sure how he was expected to reply to that. The truth in it stung, now more than ever. Where before he may have scoffed had another person said it to him, here, in this cave, the words rang horribly accurate. There was nothing Tony had truly left behind, bar a few worrying friends and a heap load of weapons which, as it turned out, were being used against the men and women he’d designed them for. Tony had nothing he’d call precious waiting for him at home, certainly not a family, and for all his money and privilege and glory he was, all in all, the sum of nothing.

Loki’s eyes stayed steadfastly on the board.

—-

“Your hands are fine, skinny britches.” Tony said as he pushed Loki aside. Tony was shifting a large sheet of melded metal to be put aside for the outer armour of the suit and Loki was in his way; had stopped dead in the middle of Tony’s direct path just to stare at his twitching fingers.

Loki met Tony’s gaze and Tony blinked at the joy which had painted the mutant’s face a picture. His eyes were warm instead of the usual cutting, and his face had brightened with glee. It wasn’t even the type of disturbed delight that he drew from the thought of their captives being slowly cut off from oxygen until their faces turned a  pleasant shade of purple - that was something which tended to put a vicious smile on Loki’ s face before he went to bed. Tony wasn’t moral enough to say he didn’t do the exact same thing.

“You alright, Igor?” A nickname which Tony had adopted when Loki essentially became his reluctant, spooky looking helper with a ridiculous accent.

“My name’s not Igor.” Loki repeated, having gone through that dance a hundred times before already, though this instance was novel in that Loki didn’t get confused or snappy about it. Tony still wasn’t sure how Loki’s mind worked, with his understanding of things such as abstract physics proving to be equal to or, alarmingly, greater than Tony’s own, but his extent of knowledge about what everyone recognised as regular or obvious things completely erratic. ‘Igor’, for example, was something which needed explaining before Loki decided he didn’t like it.

“Why are you so happy? Figured out how to murder someone with only your thumb?”

Loki’s sudden smile was eloquent. It told Tony with express frankness that murder by thumb was something Loki had long since mastered.

“Scary face aside, you look like the fourth of July come early. You wanna share with the class, cheekbones?”

Loki didn’t share. Loki simply looked down again to his fingertips, which were flexing and stretching lazily. “Everything is going to be fine, Stark.” He said, his voice at an octave which immediately raised hairs on the back of Tony’s neck. Something instinctive made the inventor want to take a step back or seven, but his own sheer stubborn idiocy and the dismissal of his flight-or-flight reflex at age nineteen allowed him to keep his ground.

“I know.” Tony said, gesturing as well as he could to the metal in his arms. “I’ll get us out of here, you’ll see.”

Loki’s eyes followed him as he passed, and he smiled again, thankfully in a somewhat saner capacity, when Tony turned to face him fully. “I’ll wager you will, Stark.” And if that wasn’t suspicious, his tone certainly was. Tony wasn’t eager to trust anyone at the moment, but he was stuck with Yinsen and Loki, though Yinsen had a tendency to keep his voice on the calming side, whereas Loki found it hilarious to creep his cellmates out as much as he could with whatever means necessary. A prank that was just bordering on cruel wasn’t unusual with Loki, as they were learning, though he had toned them down from his initial few when he quickly realised that not everyone was as… sturdy as he was.

“You don’t trust me.” Loki saw it in Tony’s measured look, and no, Tony didn’t, not fully, but at the same time there was something so incredibly honest in Loki’s fraudulence that really twisted Tony’s head. He definitely trusted Loki a lot more than the men who kept them under lock-and-key here; the terrorists who for some reason expected Tony to make them a missile to kill the people he wanted to protect simply because some shady bastard with a grin had said Tony could walk free if he did. People were idiots, Tony thought. Loki was the opposite of an idiot. Loki was also bordering on sociopathy.

“I have to trust you.” Tony replied, because it was the truth. The truth tripped Loki up, he’d noticed. When people told the truth, Loki wasn’t always sure how to reply. When people told a lie, he was quick to catch them out. Liars recognise kin, Tony supposed. That might be why he’d caught on to Loki’s game early on whilst Yinsen was still generally oblivious. The doctor was curious, perhaps, with a smattering of apprehension, but not fully distrustful. Tony, on the other hand, had no real survival instincts despite an innate identification between the alike.

“I have to trust you too, Stark.” Loki returned hesitantly. “I am not recovered, and I fear my strength will never be as it was, so you are my quickest way out of here.”

“And here I thought we were friends.”

“Please don’t misunderstand me. I do like you, though, admittedly, largely for your escape plan.”

“Why did you refuse to talk to me?” Tony wondered, because when Loki woke up there was no reason for him not to reply when Tony asked after his well-being. He replied to the doctor because Yinsen was the one who saved his life - someone who, Loki knew on a very intuitive level, he could trust. Tony had assumed Loki hadn’t spoken to him because he hadn’t been able to stretch the same courtesy to Tony, at least not at first.

Loki shrugged as a reply to his question. It was a sharp and surprisingly graceful movement which spoke of someone with an ego larger than Tony presumed. In fact, his entire manner spoke of someone majestic, respected, powerful. Tony had to wonder what he was doing in this cave in the first place. Was he like Tony? A singular in this world with something invaluable to offer? No, Tony recalled Loki was found by his captors, not deliberately taken - they said he fell through space and time, from the very stars themselves, whatever that meant.

“You’re just a dick?” Loki shrugged again, smirking. He hadn’t understood that insult at first, but after the first few times Tony had addressed him as such he had decided to ask after it. He didn’t even react anymore.

“Likely.” The man conceded. Not surprising. Of course Loki wouldn’t talk to him for days simply because he thought it was entertaining that they didn’t realise he could understand every word being said about him, apparently in every language. They had yet to find one Loki wasn’t extraordinarily fluent in.

 ”Yeah, you’re just a dick. What’s up with your hands?”

“Nothing.” Loki replied quickly.

“I don’t mean literally, like what is vertical of your hands, I mean what is wrong with them to make you keep on staring at them? Are they not your hands? Are you sown together like Frankenstein’s monster?”

“Wouldn’t you think Dr. Yinsen would have informed you of something so pertinent such as your fellow captive being a monster?” Loki spat out, the mirror opposite of his previous mood in an instant, hands held close to his chest as if protecting them. From what? From Tony? What was Tony going to do with a pair of hands? Loki’s own digits, whilst admittedly very pretty, were his own to keep.

“I’m not actually asking, green-eyes. It was a joke. Your mutation would probably just re-grow the hand anyway.”

Loki clenched his fists, backing away from Tony a few steps. Tony took one or two of his own.

“Don’t you have work to get back to, Stark?” He broke the tense silence a few moments later, and Tony grimaced.

“Don’t avoid the subject. That’s what I do and Pepper never lets me get away with it.”

“Pepper?” Loki wondered. “Is this your wife?”

“No. I already told you that I don’t have a family.” But Loki was suspicious, like he saw something deeper in what Tony was saying. Which was really odd, because there actually  wasn’t anything deeper in what Tony was saying. Pepper was an employee and, dare he say it, a friend. At least when she wasn’t shouting at him, which she tended to do a fair amount. To be fair, that was his fault and not hers at least… fifty-eight percent of the time. An argument could be made for sixty.

“Your hands, Loki?”

Loki held them out in front of him, palms facing Tony: the universal sign of surrender. Funny, but on Loki it seemed more threatening than pacifying.

“Nothing out of the ordinary, Stark.”

Tony snorted. “Like I’ll ever believe that about you.” It didn’t matter how normal his hands looked, Loki was trouble. With a big old capital T and everything.

As he turned away, Tony wasn’t sure whether Loki looked pleased or somehow insulted. Tony wasn’t completely certain what he’d meant by it, either.

—-

“It looks ridiculous.”

“You’re just saying that because I lost you at ‘piezoelectric’.”

“Stark, you lost me at ‘hydraulic’.” Loki smiled, but it wasn’t a pleasant one. To the left of them, Yinsen chuckled.

Loki was playing dummy today. Not like Dum-E at home - and didn’t that memory stab at Tony like a knife to the gut - but more like a crash-test dummy. It was really lucky to have someone who was a lot more robust than the average human being on hand to test out Tony’s crazy new schematics.

“Just stand on it.” Tony ordered, helping Loki up by the arm. They’d already had a look at the joints and the movement because Tony had been able to work that out on himself, but it would be easier to spot the flaws with someone else showcasing his creation. Also anything could happen. If Loki could survive an absent stomach he could survive a broken leg.

Gently, carefully, because mutant or not pain was still pain, Loki put the boot to the floor. He glanced up at Tony, who was leaning in far too close to be considered polite, before he fully put his weight on it. Then the next one followed.

He was wearing the majority of the legs to the suit. They were wired up to the arc reactor at the moment, so Tony actually had an excuse for his inappropriate proximity. Loki wasn’t used to the strange throw of balance they imposed upon the wearer. Nevertheless it took barely a minute for him to become accustomed, once he’d allowed himself to trust the legs to keep him safe, though he elbowed Tony in the gullet when he laughed triumphantly too loudly down Loki’s ear.

“Walk, my pretty!” Tony said, gleeful, though regretted it a second later when he saw a vicious gleam in his test-dummy’s eye and a leg movement that was just slightly too fast.

“Don’t run!” He called, but it was too late. He was clinging on to Loki’s arm desperately, working himself to try and keep up - he had no choice but to, because Loki’s new shoes were wired up to the generator keeping Tony alive.

Luckily the cave wasn’t that big, and Loki only managed a few skilfully manoeuvred laps before he got bored and stopped.

“You’re a  _dick_.” Tony confirmed, panting, but Loki was laughing, smiling wide and ridiculous, and maybe Tony could see the funny side a little. Because Tony wasn’t exactly one to preach about dickishness. If Tony and Loki’s positions were swapped he’d likely have done the exact same thing.

He went to his knees to un-strap Loki from his suit when the mutant perched himself on the countertop, and Tony received a lewd smile when he briefly glanced up. He smirked back.

“I hope you don’t read too much into this,” he said. “You’re just an experiment.”

“Oh, no, I understand.” Loki replied, hand to his heart. “Scientists get urges too, right?”

Tony took a moment to just let that sink in. He wasn’t sure which part of that statement was wrong. It made him smile, so it was at least partially funny, but everyone knew Tony had ‘urges’. People in isolated tribes in the depth of the Amazon knew that Tony had ‘urges’. His ‘urges’ tended to get his face slapped across every bad tabloid and red-top on the planet.

Tony couldn’t be completely sure, but the way that Loki sometimes spoke to him suggested that he had no idea who he was. But that was ridiculous. Loki was an intelligent mutant from one European country or another, maybe, with a more than tentative grasp on astrophysics and nuclear fusion and abstract mathematics, but he hadn’t heard of Tony Stark? Tony Stark, who practically invented whatever physics and mathematics Stephen Hawking hadn’t figured out yet? It was absurd.

The other thing that niggled at Tony’s skull was the fact Loki was rapidly adapting. His speech, unless made angry (a surprisingly difficult thing to do. Loki had triggers like everyone else, but they were fiendishly hard to find, especially when he knew Tony was onto him), was becoming increasingly usual. Almost enough to pass as a native English speaker. Loki was learning to understand things quicker, and his grasp of innuendo, once he’d figured out the lexicon, was second to none. They’d actually had a match to see who could make Yinsen blush first. It proved a draw when Yinsen revealed he had no capability of feeling embarrassment anymore. He’d been to college too. Not only that, but he also had children. Anything they could think to say was lost on the doctor. Loki had muttered something under-breath in maybe-Yiddish. Yinsen had taken a moment to stare at him sadly. Tony hadn’t dared press.

“You’re becoming more like me every day.” Tony pointed out, finally getting the last piece of machinery off Loki’s right leg. Loki’s face morphed into a sneer.

“Woe, mine soul be spared the fate.” And all at once they were back to Shakespeare. Tony rolled his eyes.

“Fellow, bid thee leave from thy accusing eye. Allow thineself freedom to be whomever thou wishes and forbade thyself from twisting this soul so heinous a shape into another alike.” He gestured to himself, smiling bitterly. “To be spared the fate, thou must stop acting like a prick.”

“You mean like you.” Loki corrected, and Tony nodded, moving onto his left leg.

“I mean like me.”

Loki stood, towering over Tony as usual, when the engineer made a gesture for him to get off the work table. Tony’s attention was back on the legs to the suit - perfectly happy with them as he was, they was always room for improvement - so he didn’t notice the way Loki’s attention fell back to his hands, nor did he see a spluttering green spark arise from the man’s palm.

Weakly, it glowed for less than a second, before dying out as if it had never existed.

On the other side of the room, Yinsen was working on the outer layer of an arm. He had looked up when Loki had tested out the armour for his own amusement. Now he had returned to it, and was concentrating fixedly. Zealously. Suspiciously so.

—-

It was almost instinctive now, when the door slammed open, that the three prisoners would hold up their arms in surrender and compliance. Tony, despite doing it before even thinking about it, didn’t deny the detestation for the symbolism of such an act. He was only alive here because of the mercy of his intellect. His continued state of being could change very swiftly at any given moment. It had scared him initially - now, it simply infuriated him.

On the opposite side of the room, Loki looked to feel the exact same way. Tony could see the feral snarl, the glint of white teeth, the hint of a challenge, even as he yielded. Everything about him was contradictory and furious and dangerous, and Tony was glad that the mutant was on his side.

The amount of men who sifted through the door this time was unusual and menacing. Nerves ate away at Tony in a way that he hadn’t experienced since his last torture session. The numbers were equal to when they had brought in the necessary equipment, and neither Tony nor Yinsen had been okay with that then. An unwelcome intrusion now, when they were getting so close to finishing, was a funeral march if ever did he see one.

A man steadily made his way through the men, looking carefully at each of the three prisoners. Tony realised all at once that the man whom he thought the leader - the one with the blinding smile, who was, now, for once, frowning - was a nobody in comparison to this new individual gracing their presence.

He looked to Tony with interest, Loki with suspicion, and then to Yinsen with dead eyes that sent a chill down Tony’s spine. This man, whoever he was, was not happy. Horrified, Tony wondered if he’d figured out their plan.

“Relax.” He said into the room, though looking specifically at the inventor. Whilst lowering his arms, Tony glanced up at his companions, confused and frightened despite himself, intimidated by this man as he approached.

Loki’s entire body spoke of a knife’s edge. He quivered with rage and suppressed vengeance. These were the men who had torn him apart; tried, endlessly, to murder him. He was a few steps away from slaughtering every single person here with his bare hands. Or maybe that was just Tony, because no one else seemed worried; perhaps it was just the fact the inventor was able to more-or-less say that he knew Loki pretty well by this point and could detect the shifts in moods from even the subtlest cue. This new man now, whoever he was, had no problem turning his back on his wrathful captive. Tony himself would confidently say that he wouldn’t dare if he was in that position. Not with Loki baring his teeth like that.

Yinsen looked more worried than scared. Likely, that was to do with the fact Tony was being approached by a cruel-eyed terrorist with a dead-set focus on the arc reactor. Tony tried not to flinch when the man made contact; not to falter and jerk backwards. It was too dangerous to have anyone so close to the only thing keeping him alive - it was doubly for it to be someone who wanted him dead eventually anyway.

The leader spoke, smooth and clear, “The bow and arrow once was the pinnacle of weapons technology. It allowed the great Genghis Khan to rule from the Pacific to the Ukraine, an empire twice the size of Alexander the Great and four times the size of the Roman empire.”

He moved away. Tony’s gaze didn’t follow where he was going - it didn’t have to. He knew what machines were on the table the man was approaching, and was glad they had been careful with the more incriminating mechanisms, such as the legs and the arms. The missile shells their captor was studying were decoys, designed to help keep up their front; maintained largely by Loki when he became restless. Loki was good at lying and knew exactly how to deceive effectively. Sometimes Tony himself forgot he wasn’t building the Jericho thanks to Loki’s efforts.

Loki himself was restless in Tony’s eye-line. Yinsen was in his periphery, frozen still and cautious, whereas Loki was the picture of agitation. It was his hands again, as it always was. He was clenching them, trying to restrain them. A nervous habit that didn’t appear to calm him. He wanted to do something violent, Tony could see it clear as day. If he could catch Loki’s attention perhaps he could signal that this was not the time. Loki, however, didn’t bother to look his way when there was a demon whom he’d like to skin alive standing mere metres away.

The man came back, blocking Tony’s view of Loki, attention once again focused on Tony’s arc reactor. Yinsen shot him a warning look, willing him to stay calm. Tony wasn’t going to attempt to approach calm, not when he was trying hard enough not to hyperventilate.

He walked slowly passed Tony, towards a table where there were at least half of the escape plan sprawled across the countertop. Tony’s answering expression to Yinsen was a desperate one. He heard crinkling to his right, and Yinsen lowly held a up hand.  _Calm, Stark. It’ll be alright._

“But today,” the man continued, leafing through the blueprints. “Whoever holds the latest Stark weapons rules these lands. And soon, it’ll be my turn.”

He turned towards Tony again, and maybe it was his imagination but Loki seemed to bristle even more. Perhaps it was the fact he was being ignored (though more than a few of the men had started to look to him warily, guns wavering in Loki’s general direction) or something else, perhaps something even a little protective. Whatever it was stated that if this man made one threatening move, Loki would have his head twisted all the way around before the gunmen obliterated them into red mist.

He started to speak in a different language all of a sudden, startling Tony with the unfamiliar noises more than it warranted. His attentions, whilst still solidly on the man before him, also shifted towards his two companions, the multi-tongues, and tried to gauge their reactions to the words in order to follow the foreign conversation.

Yinsen, as always, appeared hyper-calm. Loki just continued to look irate. Neither were helpful indicators for what was happening.

When the man began to steadily approach Yinsen, Tony felt his own hackles rise. It was one thing to try to intimidate Tony, who was strong enough to defend himself if it came down to it, and certainly another to go near Loki because no one would make it three steps towards him before Loki had their eyeballs on a keychain and their tongues sticking out through their neck. But Yinsen, Yinsen was another matter entirely. Yinsen was the protector, the nurturer, the doctor. He was the one who had kept the three of them together, alive, sane. Tony looked to Loki. Loki’s gaze was locked on the side of Yinsen’s head. He, unlike Tony, knew exactly what was being said. Loki’s fists stopped twitching. His entire body relaxed. Three gunmen knew as Tony did what that meant and three guns were pointed at Loki’s heart in a second.

The man paused, glancing up at the sudden movement, and Tony caught Yinsen’s eye in the scant few seconds in which the man was distracted. He tried to look comforting, but he knew he was missing something, and that something was scaring Yinsen and making Loki prep for a fight.

When they forced Yinsen to his knees, two men had to drop their weapons to grab Loki by the arms and hair. Another came to help when Loki proved stronger than they had expected. The leader said something mocking about Loki towards Yinsen, not bothering to directly address the thrashing man.

Loki seemed less than human in those moments, eyes wholly green and terrifying in the dim lighting, snarling and pulling, uncaring about his own wellbeing and trying to reach the man who’d caused him so much pain. Many stepped back, Tony included, and he wondered if this was the instance in which Loki, drawn taunt to his breaking point, finally snapped.

Tony felt useless, aware his own anger wouldn’t fuel his adrenaline in the way Loki’s had. He tried to think of a plan, but was once more met with a mental block as he had been in those first few months. It was psychological, it had to be. His faculties were perfectly fine, no more injured or altered than they had been mere minutes before, yet he felt fuzzy, heavy, pathetic. The last time he’d felt like this they’d dragged him out into the sunlight and forced him to make a deal. That was a time before he’d even met Loki properly. The memory seemed very distant.

When the man held up a burning nut and forced Yinsen’s head down upon an anvil, Loki growled, animalistic and effectual on the instinctual fight-or-flight reaction, and it made Tony snap himself.

“What does he want?” He demanded, increasingly hysterically as the red-hot metal was forced towards Yinsen’s mouth. “What do you want? A delivery date?” He tried to move forward, but the gunmen reacted as passionately towards his desperate movements as they had to Loki’s incensed ones. Tony took a step back, held up his hands in surrender, more than aware of the amount of weapons being pointed at him. What made it worse was that he not only knew what types of guns they were, as they were his, but he knew their firing rate, the caliber of the bullets used, and how much damage even one of them could do to a person.

Loki seemed ignorant of such facts, perhaps blissfully so, but then Loki seemed ignorant of pretty much everything that wasn’t immediately directed towards Yinsen’s current state of wellbeing.

Tony’s actions had drawn back the leader’s interest, thankfully, and here Tony saw his opening.

“I need him.” He said, as authoritatively as he could manage when his nerves were frayed and terror was trying to claw its way up his throat. Tongue heavy, he threw out, “Good assistant,” as if that’d help Yinsen’s case any.

The man stared him down, Tony tried not to blink, and then he glanced towards Loki who had fallen silent after Tony had spoken up. Tony wondered if the man would try something towards the other seemingly disposable part of Tony’s well-oiled little production line, but the man didn’t seem to be suicidal. He dropped the metal but a few centimetres away from Yinsen’s nose, and backed off.

“You have until tomorrow to assemble my missile.” He stated lowly, too close to Tony and commanding. There was no room for tricks here, not when he’d demonstrated how readily he’d rip all that mattered from a person and leave but a burnt out shell in his wake. Loki was a prime example of it. Yinsen’s heavy gasps and shaking shoulders were another.

He ordered the men away and was the first to leave the room. He didn’t look back. He didn’t need to make any threats. There was no choice. Tony would have to finish tonight, or they’d all be dead come morning.

The last person they let go of was Loki, wisely, backing away with sudden fleetness when Loki was free to move on his own volition again. His eyes were still wild, his mouth still twisted, and it was Yinsen who had to put a hand to his shoulder to bring him out of it.

Loki looked to Yinsen, his usual laser-focus absent in his rage, and he tore himself away from Yinsen’s reach after a moment, snarling all over again.

“Useless.” He spat, but it hadn’t been aimed towards either of his fellow captives. Loki stormed away in the direction of the cot and neither Tony nor Yinsen followed. There was only so far you could push a man, and Loki had gone so far past that point that he couldn’t even see where he had started anymore.

“You alright?” Tony asked Yinsen and Yinsen, like the brave soldier he shouldn’t have to be, hummed an affirmative determinedly.

“Don’t we have work to do?” He said, and Tony felt his jaw set as he nodded.

—-

Perhaps it was to do with hammering out the final piece to the plan that he so far hadn’t dared construct, but Tony felt both proud and even optimistic when he presented the smoking mask to the doctor. Even Loki, from all the way across the room doing some last minute tune-ups for Tony, looked their way.

Tony had seen them both working so diligently as he’d smashed the imperfections out of the crude and evil looking face panel. Multiple times he’d looked up briefly just to glance at his comrades.

At first, it was just to check they were working on what they were supposed to be and that they were not encountering any problems they didn’t dare approach him for. Tony wouldn’t blame them for staying back; armed with his hammer he was nothing if not a lethal weapon and Loki wasn’t the only one who was getting twitchier by the minute.

After a while Tony looked up simply to remind himself he was not alone. It wasn’t hard to lose himself in the clanging of metal and the ticking of the clock in his head. It seemed louder than before, more daunting, so much more immediate. Time was no longer a liberty and Tony was quickly running out of it.

He needed to remember that he wasn’t the only life on the line here, and the knowledge that he had two people to fight for kept him grounded. Every time he looked up, he hammered a little harder.

Eventually, Tony kept an eye on his companions simply because he could. And partially because he had to. Because whilst Loki was glancing the doctor with a strange mix of anger and protectiveness, and whilst Yinsen was checking on both his patients periodically, it didn’t mean either of them were truly paying attention. Loki was too deep in whatever ire had crawled up and infected his rational sense to so much as care for his friends, and Yinsen was likely in shock. Or he should be, anyway. He had to be at least rattled.

“I’m thinking stem cells.” Tony said after he’d let the two of them stare at his mask for a moment. He was addressing Loki. Loki looked resigned, too used to being confused around Tony that he’d just come to accept it as a matter of fact whenever the engineer opened his mouth.

“Your mutation.” Tony elaborated. “Something to do with stem cells.” He gestured Loki over, indicating he bring the tape that rested on the table with him.

Loki smirked faintly, the first positive emotion they’d managed to draw out of him since the bastards invaded their workspace earlier that day, and shrugged. “Potentially.”

Tony took the tape Loki offered him and eyed the man suspiciously, before starting to wrap it tightly around his hands with Loki watching on with mild interest.

“You know what it is, don’t you? Your mutation.” It was technically a question, but Tony already knew what Loki’s answer would be. “Tell me.”

“You wouldn’t believe me.”

“Try me. I’m ready to believe a lot of things at the moment. Better get to hoisting. Yinsen, you done?”

Yinsen approached them without question, reaching for the make-shift mechanism designed to hang up the suit for the easiest manual assembly around a person.

It really was an ugly hulking thing, his armour, but Tony couldn’t help looking upon it fondly, dotingly. It was excellent, if only because it was the last thing their captors would expect to come crashing down their doors.

“Magic.” Loki finally answered, staring at Tony looking for a reaction. Tony snorted.

“No need to get cute. We’re all scientists here.”

Loki rolled his eyes, somewhat inappropriately to the situation, and Tony felt he’d missed something again. He wasn’t sure what it was this time, since they’d been speaking in English as far as Tony had been aware, but he was also highly conscious that there was a fact or two which had passed him by and they were the ones needed for full comprehension.

Tony didn’t press because they were short on time and Loki and Yinsen both helped him clad from head to toe in leather - the suit was more than uncomfortable without it. Loki had learnt that the hard way when he ran around in Tony’s boots.

“Why show this?” Loki wondered as the chest piece was fitted and Tony was slowly bolted in. Loki tapped at the circle which presented the glow of the arc reactor. “Surely the suit would be no less effective should you hide it.”

“No need, it’s solid.” Tony replied absently, double-checking his companions’ work as they moved on to the next lock. “I wouldn’t make something like this delicate.”

“That must be why you recoil when I touch it.” Loki said snidely, rapping his fingers over it again. Tony half wanted to kick him, but couldn’t yet move in the unpowered armour. It’s weight was much too great.

“That’s because you’re stronger than you look. For all I know you  _could_  break it with a touch.”

“Is that a challenge?”

“Let’s see how it faces against bullets before going against you.” Tony returned, some amount of dark humour edging into his voice in a knee-jerk response to Loki’s own. “One step at a time, Loki.”

“I think you want to scare them. You want them to see you coming.”

Tony didn’t deny it.

“Can you move?” Yinsen asked, cutting across the two of them. Tony didn’t reply beyond a flexing of his muscles. “Say it again.” The doctor then demanded.

“Forty-one steps straight ahead, then sixteen steps, that’s from the door, fork right, thirty-three steps, turn right.” It was directions to the exit. There were so many tunnels that Tony could easily get lost if he make a wrong turn, and vision would be limited behind the mask. Even if it wasn’t, Tony wouldn’t have known his way out, only ever having been taken outside the once. Loki hadn’t had the first clue either, because they’d never taken him that way at all. Yinsen, however, had been dragged  out there several times, and he had always proved more useful to the Ten Rings when he was lucid, so the doctor had been able to remember where he was taken. It would be their mistake now, as the directions Yinsen fastidiously paid attention to was going to be one of the crucial details that determined success or failure in their mission. The doctor had Loki repeat the mantra too, despite the fact he’d be leaving with Yinsen to guide the way. 

“You seemed protective.” Tony said in a moment where Yinsen moved to the other side of the room to grab the extra padding for Tony’s knees. “Earlier, I mean.”

“I owe Dr. Yinsen for much.” Loki replied. “As do you.” He didn’t look up from where he was screwing the arms to the shoulder joint. Tony understood, of course. Yinsen was their priority here, as they had been his throughout the entirety of their imprisonment. Now it was their turn to repay him. They’d do anything to get him back to his family, back to Gulmira.

“Yinsen! Stark!” A man started to call from the door, and Yinsen looked to Loki desperately.

“Say something!” Tony hissed, but Yinsen shrugged, shaking his head. It was Loki who shouted back, apparently in Hungarian, though Tony had long since lost track of which language was which.

None of them were much bothered by the threat of another sudden intrusion, mostly because the scrap pieces of decoy Loki had laid out yesterday on the table was now wired up to the door - an explosion awaiting the first ones to open it. This way the door would remain open and Tony wouldn’t have to waste ammunition simply getting passed the first barrier.

Really, it was all so simple it was laughable. Get the enemy to explode the door and then Tony would clear the way with his flame-throwers. The problem was that they weren’t ready yet.

“They’re coming in.” Loki warned with just enough time for them to brace themselves for the inevitable destruction of those damned metal doors. Tony would be glad to see them go. They represented the main barricade of their confinement.

“How’d that work?” He asked when the silence settled again and Yinsen and Loki were staring at the entryway.

Yinsen replied, “Oh, my goodness,” and Loki just smiled. Slow and vicious and sharp, he smiled.

“It worked alright.” Yisnen allowed.

“That’s what I do.” A delicious mixture of feelings churned inside of Tony when he had heard the bomb go off behind his back - righteous fury was one of them, along with gratification and delight. Fear played as spicing to his inner emotional stew, but that was only because if there were people who hadn’t been killed by the bomb, as unlikely as it was, he couldn’t do anything at this very second to protect his friends from their guns.

Nothing happened immediately, much to everyone’s relief, but they all knew others were coming. They couldn’t have more than a few minutes.

“There isn’t enough time,” Yinsen breathed, before dashing off to where sizzling smears which were once human bodies lay, smoking.

“Yinsen!” Loki barked, but it wasn’t enough. The man was about to rush after the doctor, but Tony’s desperate calls brought him back.

“Where is he going?” Tony demanded because he couldn’t see properly over his shoulder, but he knew Yinsen was fleeing in a dangerous direction and  _that wasn’t part of the plan_. “Finish this! Initialise the power sequence. Function 11, and there should be a progress bar. Tell me when you see the progress bar.”

Loki typed as quickly as he could, hesitating for a second when he realised he had no idea where the function buttons were. It didn’t take a genius however to see  _F11_ and work it out from there. He  _was_  a genius, after all. He also kept on glancing to the door, wanting to chase after Yinsen himself.

“Don’t even think about it!” Tony exclaimed urgently. “Tell me when you see it!”

“I see it. What do I do?”

“Press control - bottom left corner - and the  _i_ button together.”

“Yes.” Loki confirmed.

“Press  _enter_.”

“Done.” Loki said, having hesitated for a second again but swiftly recovered. It had taken him the longest to find the  _i_. Despite his English accent, it was more than clear that he didn’t use the English alphabet. Or, in fact, a computer.

“Get over here and button me up.” Tony demanded next, because there wasn’t anything left to do but wait. They could hear yelling voices storming down the corridor, and Tony tried to drown out the thought that Yinsen was out there too. “Every other hex bolt. Nothing pretty, just get it done.” He instructed, ignoring Loki when he hissed acknowledgement.  _I know, Stark. Cease your futile grasp at taking control. Nervous babbling won’t get us anywhere faster._ Tony knew that, thank you, Loki.

“They’re close.” Loki murmured at the same volume as Tony, who, in his increasing panic, had dropped his tones to something resembling deadly calm. In the background they heard the first rattling of bullets, and then significantly more returning fire. “He got a gun.” Loki explained to Tony, which didn’t help Tony’s nerves at all. But, in all fairness, the terrorists would shoot at the good doctor either way, armed or not. Better he take down a few of the bastards with him.

They couldn’t distinguish between the guns now nor who was firing what, and they could only hope after Yinsen, the big-hearted idiot.

“Make sure the checkpoints are clear before you follow me out.” Tony demanded, because there may still be a chance to save Yinsen, but was no way he was losing Loki too if he could help it. Loki would be safe as long as he kept a fair few paces behind Tony at all times.

Loki shook his head, glancing at the progress bar on the screen of their crappy computer. What Tony wouldn’t give for his own tech and JARVIS. “We need more time.”

“No!” Tony ordered immediately, despite the fact there was no way for him to stop whatever Loki was thinking of doing. “No, stick to the plan. You stay here and I’ll go get Yinsen. I promise I’ll get Yinsen.” Alive or dead, he would, he swore it.

Loki shot him a dirty look. “I wasn’t thinking that, you fool. I’m not suicidal.” A flash of something passed over Loki’s eyes, but it was gone before Tony could identify it and he was staring fixedly at the arc reactor in a similar manner to the man who’d dropped by to say hello the day before. Tony, even though he knew he could trust Loki, still wanted to take a step back. He was stuck, however, on the harness in a half-powered suit. There was only so much he  _could_  do right then.

Loki’s hand hovered just above the arc reactor and his eyes closed. Tony couldn’t see over the bulky armour to keep an eye on what exactly Loki was up to, but he could observe that way Loki’s lips moved in something that could have been a prayer.

“Prayers won’t help.” He snapped, and Loki’s eyebrows creased, but he didn’t stop for a long minute. When he did open his eyes, he breathed out heavily, looking a little more drained than before, and that was saying something since he was half a shade from vampire even at his best.

“What was that?” Tony asked, and Loki waved the question away. Without even looking at the progress bar, he slipped on Tony’s helmet firmly, said, “You’re done.” And then the lights flickered and died completely. Loki faded from Tony’s sight.

They could hear the manic footsteps approach now, minus the gunfire. Tony didn’t have to speculate to know what that meant.

—-

The dark was a useful ally. Tony had to trust that Loki would keep out of his way because he couldn’t see where he was going any better than the armed men who ran towards them did. At least Loki could hear Tony move in this suit. Tony himself couldn’t hear a great deal of anything, rattling and thumping and clomping as he was at every twitch of a limb.

Loki was nowhere in sight when the guns started rattling after Tony had thrown his first kidnapper across the room, illuminating the cave quite beautifully as the bullets exploded outwards. Tony didn’t have time to worry about it; the sooner he dispatched the men the better off for Loki it would be.

Their horrified faces just brought even more pleasure to every punch and whack Tony dished out to his tormenters.

—-

There was something very satisfying about being capable of  striking a man so hard he hit the opposite wall, with only minimal effort. It felt like he was doling out suitable punishment with the added insult of not actually giving any thought to it. Murdering a person with effort meant that they were important. They weren’t, not to Tony. Not like Loki was, not like Yinsen was. These men weren’t worth the muck on his friends’ shoes.

Every blow felt like justice for himself and for his fellow captives. For the families which had been torn apart, for the tortures Loki wouldn’t speak about, for the lives the Ten Rings had destroyed. Today, there was no merciful bone in Tony’s body. Quite especially not when they pointed their guns at him in much the same way he could imagine they’d done to Dr. Yinsen.

—-

The leader of the Ten Rings was waiting for him by the entrance, but the first thing Tony saw was Yinsen, coughing up blood and staring forlornly at the sun which seeped in through the cave entry. A half-strangled, “Watch out!” was Tony’s only warning before a bazooka almost took off his head.

Tony was only glad to return fire. After that, the bastard stayed down.

Loki had been closer behind Tony than the inventor had expected, and as soon as the enemy landed on the dirt floor he had rushed to Yinsen’s side.

“Foolish mortal!” The dark-haired man snapped, encasing the doctor’s head in his hands. “You cannot expect help from me now. I don’t have enough after spending it on him.” Yinsen smiled slightly, dazed and dopey with pain, and didn’t reply.

“Loki, move.” Loki sent a hateful glare to Tony, but seemed to be able to read the threatening undertone which stated that Loki was a skinny mutant and Tony was in a metal suit with guns strapped to it. His attention turned to Yinsen.

“Come on, we gotta go.” He knew as well as Yinsen did that movement wasn’t going to happen easily, but they were so close now and they could make it. They  _would_  make it. “Move for me, come on. We’ve got a plan and we’re going to stick to it. Help me, Loki.”

“This was always the plan,” Yinsen breathed, glancing at Loki from under heavy eyelids, resisting any attempts that either man made to shift him. Neither Tony nor Loki were hesitant about touching him near wounds, as the priority here was life and boo-boos could be seen to later when they didn’t have people with guns waiting for them right outside.

“You’re gonna go see your family,” Tony insisted. “Get up.”

“My family is dead.” Yinsen said, not cooperating with their pushing hands. “I’m going to see them now.”

Tony involuntarily let his fingers loosen and Loki swore at him in some language or another when Yinsen landed heavily on his wounded shoulder.

“It’s okay,” the injured man tried to soothe them both, as he would, as he had always tried to do. Pity it didn’t work. “I want this, I want this.”

Loki let his hand move from supporting Yinsen’s back to gripping his upper arm punishingly. Tony huffed out something that might have been a bitter laugh if he wasn’t feeling so exhausted.

“Thank you for saving me.” He finally said, because he couldn’t remember if he’d managed honest gratitude in the last few months and he was more than aware that if anyone deserved it from Tony Stark, it would be this man.

“Don’t waste it.” Yinsen’s hand and come to cover Loki’s. It wasn’t asking Loki to loosen his vicious hold but rather it was there to comfort, because he still stubbornly considered his friends over himself. “Don’t waste your lives.”

When his face grew slack, Loki spoke in that same foreign tongue; something guttural and low and beautiful. Loki’s face was black with anger. Tony could only presume his was the mirror image.

Whoever was waiting outside for them was not going to be waiting much longer. No amount of guns were going to help them now. They would rue the day they brought Tony to this godforsaken place.

—-

Tony couldn’t smell much through the mask, but the roast of flesh and the heavy smoke seeped in regardless. Loki had the collar of his shirt pressed over his nose and mouth, eyes mostly closed, trying his hardest to keep close to Tony and away from the flames.

Tony grabbed Loki’s waist, having only thought briefly about how they were going to get away from the camp fast after they’d burnt it down since it was going to blow up straight after. To be honest, at the time of planning the three of them hadn’t been convinced they’d make it this far at all. That only one of them was down so far was a miracle within itself. Tony wasn’t happy about it, but he had to look on the bright side: Loki was alive, and Tony was too. But they wouldn’t be much longer if Tony’s boots didn’t rocket them away.

It was going to be a tough landing. He told the other man to brace himself. He tried to angle them both Loki-up when he hit the ground, but knew the mutant was just as likely to survive as he himself was, even without a protective suit of armour. Possibly because of it.

Tony groaned as he tore the mask away from his face, glancing around to see where Loki had rolled off to.

The green-eyed man was lying on his back a few hundred yards away, sprawled inelegantly in the sand, battered and bruised but breathing, and staring up at the sun like he’d never seen it before. It must have been a hard imprisonment for him, to draw such wonder out of simply looking up to the blue sky.

He glanced at Tony eventually, smiling when he saw the inventor staring back. He started to laugh lowly, nothing but a breathy snicker, before Tony joined in and it grew until they were both heaving with hysterical glee.

“Not bad.” He complimented, basking in the sunlight, and Tony took the praise as if it had just won him the Nobel prize.

Slumping against his armour tiredly, breathlessly, deliriously, he echoed the sentiment.

**Author's Note:**

> Russian translation (aka, what I was aiming for them to say):  
> “Hello. My name is Yinsen. You are safe for now. They will not come for you.”  
> “You are the man who saved my life.”  
> “Yes.”  
> “What is your name?”  
> “Loki.”  
> “Where are you from?”  
> “This man is Tony Stark.”  
> “He can help you, if you’ll let him. We need to check that you are well.”  
> “I can assure you I am well, Dr. Yinsen.”  
> “Please.”  
> “If it pleases you both.”  
> “I beg your pardon?”  
> “Oh, for the sake of Odin.”  
> “I am healing. The fact I woke up should highlight this.”  
> “Are you in any pain?”  
> “Yes, of course.”  
> “You can sleep, Loki.”  
> “I would like to see you try and stop me, doctor.”


End file.
